FELDBUSCHWIESNER is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by artist Kota Ezawa.
Memory is the driving force behind Ezawa's work, which involves recreating images from popular culture and collective history.
His chosen mediums range from digital animation and lightboxes to collage, prints, and sculpture. For Ezawa, images can have a life of their own just as much as the people and places they depict. He translates iconic moments from film, the media and art history into images and animated videos that are reminiscent of Warhol and Lichtenstein pop art.
His characteristic style involves reducing the physical and psychological expression of the protagonist to a minimum. For his videos, Kota Ezawa reconstructs each selected scene from his source material in a time-consuming digital collage of silhouettes.
These manually produced videos possess a highly distinctive style that, for Ezawa, has its roots in painting. Through these techniques, Kota Ezawa reproduces the lost aura of well-known media images and explores the relationship between reality and reproduction.

Marrakech is a cultural, geographical and artistic crossroads between North and Sub-Saharan Africa, East and West. As a metaphorical centre, the city and its art biennial are the focus of the exhibition Carrefour/Meeting Point—The Marrakech Biennale and beyond at ifa Gallery Berlin.

Carrefour—a crossroad where narratives meet. Each narrative embodies an individual trajectory with its own subjective mapping and centre: that from which one speaks. How can dialogue occur when individual trajectories meet, beyond the borders of words?

This exhibition is a journey towards “other” modes of experiential and material connection. An invitation to draw porous routes and explore languages that counter the geographic and metaphorical distance that separates us. The starting point of this exhibition takes as a fictional centre the Marrakech Biennale. The curator Alya Sebti has invited participants of past editions to develop ideas and projects within a new space of encounter.

With existing works as well as commissioned projects, they have created new forms of language negotiating between alternatives forms of translation and transmission: where music becomes a unique orientation; where olfactory experience draws a conversation between poetry and fragrance; where weaving performs as a geometry lesson and shield masks open up to listen to the polyphony of voices expressed by the individual whose path reaches a crossing—Carrefour / Meeting Point.

In recent years the ifa Galleries Berlin and Stuttgart have presented various international biennials which were, like the Marrakech Biennale, supported by the ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations). The ifa is in charge of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and as an actor in international artistic exchange, it gives impulses in the discussions about the modes of operation of art biennials.

About the ifa
The ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) is committed to a peaceful and enriching coexistence of people and cultures worldwide. It promotes artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue and conference programmes. As a competence centre for foreign cultural and educational policy, the ifa connects civil societies, cultural practices, art, media and science. It initiates, moderates and documents discussions about international cultural relations. The ifa has a global network and counts on long-term cooperation. It is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg and the city of Stuttgart.

With FORMING LOOSE, the Jette Rudolph Gallery is pleased to present three contemporary positions on art in one exhibition. Using forms, constructions and experimental materials, the artworks create potential extensions of the empirical world.

The Gallery Jordan/Seydoux is pleased to present “Sein und Schein”, a summer exhibition showcasing the works of 8 artists. The show will include drawings and various graphic works from the four main printing techniques : etching, lithography, screenprint and woodcut.

The artworks hover between figurative and abstract, reality and illusion and only upon closer inspection do they reveal their actual character. The motifs, such as those in the woodcuts of the Chinese artist Qibiao Wang appear to the observer upon deeper inspection. Wangs artworks are composed of abstract surfaces and shapes forming the face of Buddha, while in the ink drawings of Ulrike Byttner lines are the dominant element. Byttner constructs figures mainly through overlapping contours which combine to form an abstract ensemble.

Frédérique Loutz creates human fantasy figures in her lithographies. Her source of inspiration are myths and fairytales. Loutz exploits every aspect of the technique to give her artwork a dynamic and experimental character. The revised heliogravures from Odile Maarek range between fantasy and illusion. The observer is inclined to associate the unreal images with literary works from the black romantic era. The prints from Francoise Pétrovitch incorporate this theme. Her artworks show fabulous female figures which connect to the emotional world of the observer.

The etchings from Diana Quinby impress with the choice of the motif. For instance, the artworks display particular details of the human body.

The named artworks are confronted with the works of Bernard Cousinier and Frank Badur. Those based on colour and shapes, and transmit a kind of reality through their abstractness, which doesn´t rely on the rendition of objects.

In the late 1960s Oswaldo Lares (b. 1932, Maracaibo, Venezuela) began making weekly excursions from Caracas along rural roads spanning from Caribbean villages to Los Llanos (the plains) to the Amazon rainforest, intent on meeting those people who continued to embody Venezuela's musical heritage. Inspired by the diverse indigenous, African and European influences he found in each town, Lares began to document the musicians, dances and festivals in order to introduce them to a wider audience. In 1971 he acquired a portable Nagra reel-to-reel recorder with which he built an expansive audio archive over the next two decades.

While documenting and archiving the sounds of Venezuela was integral to his goal, its static nature left a disconnect between the listener and the true essence and profundity of the social experience. To remedy this, Lares started a music group called Convenezuela in 1974 which learned traditional songs from all over the country and performed them in Caracas and internationally. This live element was also supplemented by a regular radio show in which Lares told stories and played the music he had recorded, meticulous is his descriptions of the locations, dates, and players.

With the aim of keeping the archive active, Guillermo Lares and Laura Jordan (Oswaldo's son and daughter-in-law) have initiated a project designed to generate new dialogs around it, introducing its wealth of content and knowledge to new communities and generations through meaningful and creative engagement.

The first phase of this project is the opening of the archive at the Berlin project space Kinderhook & Caracas, inviting the public to enter ‘inside’ the archive to explore the rich, and often overlooked rural musical traditions of Venezuela within a setting designed to welcome congregation and interaction.

Accompanying the extended exhibition is a program of on- and off-site events including discussions, concerts, listening sessions, and visits with Oswaldo Lares himself. Please check website for details.

Guest curator Arne Reimann shows two artistic positions that interact with the gallery space, the first on a sculptural level, the second on a pictorial one. Whilst the two artists’ approach to their respective subject matter differs greatly at first sight, one senses a shared interest in blurring formal and iconographic information in their work. Despite their abstract appearance, the starting point for both Thomas Musehold’s (1982) and Markus Saile’s (1981) drawings, sculptures and paintings remains the figure.

Thomas Musehold’s sculptural work draws on found objects which he uses as a visual aid and turns into sculpture. He analyses and processes these objects; visually through drawings and formally by modifying them by hand or through chemical treatments. For instance, he employs sculptures made of carved wood which often exhibit pastoral or religious motifs and were commonly found in bourgeois sitting rooms of the 1950s. He also works with objects found in nature such as archaic-looking cones or undated glass.

These objects serve as a starting point for further investigation; Musehold begins to chip away at sections, to enter into the material, to shape, to carve and to cut, to form and to cast it. He highlights these newly found forms by finishing the surface in a way that corresponds to the individual object, using commonplace procedures such as shellac polishing or flip flop varnish.

The presentational structures specially developed by Musehold echo the gallery’s architecture, adapting to the reflective surfaces of the space as well as relating to Markus Saile’s paintings hanging on the walls.

Saile’s painterly work contains traces of the object and clear formal brushstrokes that, however, virtually dissolve in the multiple transparent layers of pigment on the canvas, interacting continually with shades of light and tonal values. Only rarely can the landscapes, spatial relations and half-remembered forms be descried in between the layers. Every greatly diluted layer of paint is followed by a process of washing out, overlapping, erasing and amassing. The chalk gesso that Saile employs has a long tradition in art history; indeed, it is the oldest and most durable priming technique and has been used for over 1000 years. It also possesses a certain luminosity as the colour is absorbed by the base, thus supporting the artist’s glazing process. The colours used also have historical connotations, recalling the scarlet hues of the sovereigns of historical paintings.

The paintings do not have a flat surface, however; the pearls, ridges and welts created by the gesso and the subsequent layers of colour make the works expand into space, confirming their status as objects and linking them back to Musehold’s sculptures which, in turn, are presented in an installation-like manner.

In the process-oriented development of Musehold and Saile’s works, the information necessary to decode motifs is largely lost, whittled down, eroded. It is only in the tactile qualities of both the sculptures’ and the paintings’ surfaces that the remaining traces are still tangible, piquing the curiosity of the viewer.

The title of the show – corraxoma – gives expression to both artists’ practices, linking chance, deterioration and analytical interest. The artificial word is composed of “corrasion”, a geomorphological term for the process of the mechanical erosion of the earth’s surface through wind and rain, and “xoma” which references alchemistical components in a pseudoscientific way.